Segments from Wednesday, August 6, 2014

Measuring ‘p-waves’ to warn the public of impending quakes

Earthquakes, unlike other natural disasters, often hit without warning. But some countries have systems to give residents a heads-up before one strikes. Despite a history of deadly quakes in California, the U.S. has no widespread warning system. The NewsHour’s Cat Wise reports on ShakeAlert, a project in development in Southern California that measures initial waves before a strong shaking.

The collision and shattering of world powers during World War I have laid the foundation for wars being waged today. For analysis of the war’s footprints, Jeffrey Brown is joined by Margaret MacMillan of University of Oxford, John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Jack Beatty, the author of "The Lost History of 1914: Reconsidering the Year the Great War Began."

The treatment of two Ebola-infected Americans with an experimental drug, Z-Mapp, raises the question of whether it has potential for widespread use in combating the outbreak in West Africa. Judy Woodruff gets debate on the topic from Dr. Robert Garry of Tulane University School of Medicine and Laurie Garrett of the Council on Foreign Relations.

The New York Times and a Midwest security firm are reporting a massive breach of online privacy that includes the collection of more than a billion username and password combinations and more than 500 million email addresses. Gwen Ifill talks to Dmitri Alperovitch of CrowdStrike about the method and urgency of the hack and who might be behind it.

After a 10-year journey, the space probe Rosetta is orbiting a comet 250 million miles away from Earth. The spacecraft is slated to follow the comet for more than a year on its way toward the sun. Hari Sreenivasan talks to Mark McCaughrean, senior scientific advisor of the European Space Agency, about sifting through a cosmic “garbage pile” in hopes of learning about the building blocks of life.

Three years after the disaster at Fukushima, science correspondent Miles O'Brien returned to the Daiichi nuclear plant for an exclusive look at the site. Follow Miles on a never-before-seen tour of Daiichi's sister site, Fukushima Daini, which narrowly avoided a meltdown during the Tohoku earthquake. As the country debates turning its reactors back on, Miles asks: will Japan have a nuclear future?

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